Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself

I see I last did this in 2011, so why not?
( on to the meme )

I was totally inspired by cesperanza's challenge to post every day for a chunk of time, and yet have not managed to type words on a page. So, a quick update at least to say I'm still alive, still around in my usual lurking mode, and wishing you all well (well, I tried for quick & it turned out I had a lot to say).

I did manage to finally persevere and get a corrected birth certificate, which made getting a passport super easy (I got to see how it works for most US-born white men - totally different experience). Perhaps I will write up the specifics at some point, but really, I just wanted to celebrate with you all that I finally got that done.

I started a new job today after being off work for more than 2 years. Which meant I got to use my passport for the first time, to prove citizenship for my I-9, so that was exciting. My new company does background checks on new employees, & in CA we can get a copy of what they found, so I learned that I will never escape my birth name as the SSA helpfully gives out when I first got my Social Security card & the name on it then. So that sucked but HR is supposed to keep it confidential & has made no comments (and most importantly. it did not prevent my hiring). I'll probably consult the Transgender Law Center at some point to see if they have any suggestions, but also I hope to live in a world where I don't have a lot of background checks done.

But really, I want to say I'm excited to be back at work, I like all the coworkers I've met (even the guy with whom I had a pretty uncomfortable phone interview has turned out to be much better in person), my job is interesting, challenging, and something I feel I can be successful at (after the end of my last job, the latter was one of my top criteria). I'll be doing project management at a software company, and given that I'm a total Process Queen as long as process serves the work, this is a good fit for me I think. I've never been just a project manager - it's always been one of my many hats, so in some ways this feels extremely relaxing, like I'll have time to do a really good job rather than just getting by. We'll see how that plays out. It's not relaxing yet, as I'm in the new job I can't even follow this conversation because you are speaking the secret internal language that I don't yet know phase, but it's also not overwhelming, which is nice. I've definitely paid more sustained attention today than I have in ages & my brain feels a bit like it's leaking out my ears, but not so much that I don't want to go back tomorrow.

Fannishly, I accidentally got into The Bridge remake on FX. jae posted about it, and how the original was much better, so I put it from my mind, but then she posted a review from someone who liked it, and that review hooked me, and then the show hooked me. Much of the season is online at FX or on Hulu if you want to check it out. Yes, it's about a serial killer, but it's not nearly so serial killers/killings are sexy and much more thinky and nuanced. Anyway, I'd be up for conversations about the show if you're watching it.

I also accidentally got into Longmire. I'm not sure I can put into words why I find it so compelling. Certainly there are many very attractive people in it (Katee Sackoff (Starbuck from BSG) and Bailey Chase (from a lot of things) make the deputy sheriff uniform ridiculously sexy, and Lou Diamond Phillips only looks better with age), but that's not the only thing.

Neither of these shows has led me to seek out fanfiction, though if any of you have recs I would certainly not turn them down. I'm still reading a lot of Avengers, Vorkosigan Saga when I can find it, and after re-reading the first 2 books in The Curse of Chalion series I've been making my way through the fanfic. It's funny how I want different kinds of stories from different fandoms. All I really want from The Curse of Chalion fic is explorations of the religion & the experiences of being a Saint, but usually I'm all about light & fluffy, happy endings, relationship exploration, and of course hot porn. Vorkosigan Saga I end up interested in world-building, character exploration - maybe it's that with book fandoms I want more like the books (but queerer & sexier :).

To close, I'll mention the fic that's really grabbed me lately (not meant to be an all-inclusive list!). I re-read Ellen Fremedon's Twenty-Year Man & Miss Lanyon's A Charity Case, both Vorkosigan Saga, very plotty, lots of fun. Ivan's not the big draw for me in the books but somehow gets the best fic; Byerly is more of a draw to me & I like him even better in fic. & Avengers-wise, I was so completely absorbed by SallyExactly's Chance I first dove into it & couldn't stop for wanting to see what happened & then tried desperately to slow down so it wouldn't end. She says there will be more coming, and I am crossing my fingers that this will come to pass. It's all about Natasha, and her & Clint's backstory, and action-packed, and now I'm just flailing my hands about to demonstrate how awesome it is, which doesn't easily translate to text. I have to be careful or I'll start re-reading now & I'm already up past my bedtime.

So, I don't have a passport - never had one. I've been meaning to get one since they started being required to go to Canada & Mexico, even got as far as filling out the paperwork nearly 2 years ago, but never quite got it together. So, when I say Part I, really, it's Part 300000000, but we'll start counting again for the sake of simplicity.

Today, I looked in the mirror, thought, hey, my hair looks ok, my skin is good, I should go get my picture taken for my passport. I called the nearby Walgreens, found they did indeed do passport photos & the photo dept was still open (no matter what my day looks like, errands always happen between 6 and 9PM - it's a thing, and while it would be better if I could shift this, the list of more important things for me to focus on is large so I mostly accept this & move on), so I threw on a nice shirt in a good color & zipped out the door.

I got to the store with no trouble, found good parking, all was good so far. There's some random person paying at the photo counter, paying for many many items and unloading them very slowly, so I loitered, doing my best imitation of a patient person. Eventually, it's my turn, the clerk grabbed a tiny digital camera, pulled down a white shade, and took my picture. I learned that if I were getting a European passport, I would need to not smile, but for US it's fine. He showed me the picture, and since my eyes were open, I agreed it was fine. He looked surprised, which made me paranoid. I asked him if he asked because he thought it was a bad picture, and he looked uncomfortable and told me no, most people just want to try multiple pictures. He transferred the picture to a computer, adjusted the image, took some information from me, and said my photos would be ready in 5 minutes.

Five minutes is five minutes more than I want to spend in Walgreens, but not long enough to be worth going elsewhere, so I browsed. I discovered a number of interesting things: their price for hydrogen peroxide is not very good, they have a large assortment of walking canes but only one was made of wood (metal was the most common), and they don't seem to carry rulers of any type. They did have some nice windchimes (CVS does too actually; not sure what it is about drug stores & windchimes).

My five minutes were up so I wandered back up front and found two clerks, the one I started with, and a new one. The new one asked me if she could take a new picture - the color was apparently off in the first one. What could I do but agree? She took not one but three pictures, the third with the camera practically up my nose. That was the one she liked, and again, she transferred the photos to the computer, took more information from me, and off I went to explore the store further. This time I found a variety of things to purchase, including a new pair of sunglasses, ones actually made to fit over my regular glasses. This is an enormous step up from my previous pair which had only one arm left and balanced precariously and uncomfortably on the tip of my nose, so I guess they did me a favor.

These photos she deemed acceptable, so I am now closer to getting a passport than I ever have been before. Today's adventures did nothing to alleviate my anxiety about getting a passport - this was supposed to be the easy part! For some trans folks, even this part could be fraught with judgement, commentary, or worse, but I present normatively gendered, and had no issues on that front. & yet, what I thought would be a five minute process was twenty - what will happen when I get to the really hard part?

Because of course, the reason I haven't gotten a passport before, and the reason I have anxiety about all parts of the process, even those which I rationally know are no big deal, is because I'm trans, and I know that the at some point, I am going to have to stand before some random stranger and explain that while my birth certificate says F and one name, all my other documentation says M and another name, and that's how my passport should be. For all my issues with and complex feelings about Obama, his administration has done good things on this front - I don't have to do a name/gender change with the court, so long as I can show I've been using this name for a certain number of years (less than the 13 nearly 14 years that I have); I can just bring a generic note from my doctor, no longer one with invasive medical details. Truly, my main worry at this point (aside from fear of general transphobia, which I've certainly experienced in trying to sort other documentation: I'm looking at you SSA) is about proving that I'm also the person on my birth certificate. After all these years, the only thing I have in my old name other than it is my original social security card. Presumably that will be enough - my SSN didn't change - but if it's deemed to not be, I'm not sure what I could do. Which yes, anxiety talking, and I'll cross that bridge if & when I come to it.

Anyway, my plan is to get together my paperwork tomorrow (apparently this will involve a visit to Kinkos as I need to copy all my ID docs), and head over to the Santa Clara County Office of the Clerk Recorder on Friday. My thought is that the folks there might be a bit more professional with transfolk as they're more likely to have encountered us for a variety of reasons, but that's pure speculation. Anyway, wish me luck!

This entry was originally posted at http://jcalanthe.dreamwidth.org/112622.html ( comments there).

I can now safely reveal that my surprise for bearfairie was to see Cavalia tonight. It was indeed a spectacle worthy of my 40th birthday, and all the more fun to share with her. It reminded me how much I've enjoyed working in theater before (on a MUCH smaller scale). & the horses were gorgeous, the tumbling & wirework amazing, I loved the music (which is live & apparently adjusts to the actions of the horses in realtime). I am still amazed by the sheer creativity of all the different ways for humans & horses to interact - horses danced, groups of horses did elaborate maneuvers together, there was jumping, there was tumbling on horseback & over horses & around horses, there was wirework interacting with horse & rider, there was one scene which I swear was about herding cats but with 5 horses, and so on.

If it's in your area, I highly recommend going. & for those of you local, it's in San Jose til Aug 26, and they're running a buy 5 get 5 free special. If we could scrounge up a big enough group, I'd go again. :)

Today, I read winterhill's A Very Special Episode, which is an XMen AU where Erik & Charles are actors & they and other XMen are working on a My Little Pony spinoff with gay ponies. Plus its companion piece, The Secret of Dragon Ranch, which is the My Little Pony story in question. Both are fantastic - I can't believe I've not only read something related to My Little Pony but am recommending it (and kudos to whoever rec'd them to me - I can't remember who it was alas).

A Very Special Episode reminds me a lot of the Sherlock actor AU Performance in a Leading Role by Mad Lori, which is also ridiculously long and ridiculously awesome. I didn't know I had a thing for actor AUs before, but apparently I do. Should you know of any others you'd rec, I'd love to hear about them.

I am experimenting with tumblr: http://jcalanthe.tumblr.com/. Largely to try & figure out where everyone went - it's pretty quiet in lj/dw-land of late. I find it a little baffling (I think their UI could be more opaque but it would take effort), but the pictures are pretty. I've not been tracking who's on tumblr for the most part, so if you are, point me in your direction.

Unrelatedly, I feel the need to share that I really dislike the phrase "genetic women" - for many reasons, most personally because that phrase includes me, which, f* you buddy. Seriously, I think the people using this phrase would be even more uncomfortable/upset if I showed up to a "genetic women only" event than I am by their use of it - not only offensive but also not accurate to what they think they're saying.

I was glad to read today that PCon has declared that attendance at gender-limited events will be based on self-identified gender next year. Better late than never. I'm not on the no-gender-limited-events boat, so I'm totally happy with this policy - my only complaint is how long it took to get here.

I've been sitting with the announcement that a local cis-gendered-women-only coven has shifted to start to offer public events inclusive of transwomen, and public events open to all. I get that leaving their lineage is a really big deal, and go them for continuing to engage with this issue. I keep coming back to the fact that the core group is still cis-gendered-women-only (as far as I understand) - it's like, well, transwomen are now good enough to attend public rituals but only cis-gendered women are worthy of putting them on. I'm totally with them on helping normalize public events as inclusive, and I see this is a positive step, I just can't seem to get past this.

I dunno, lately I haven't wanted to put on my spokestranny britches and educate, educate, educate. But that doesn't mean that when people I know say hurtful things I don't get hurt - it's more personal, more hurtful when it's someone I have a relationship with (and here I'm talking a bit about the aforementioned coven but mostly other things). I guess it's better to know these things about people? Yay for practice in not taking things personally?

How did my cheery yet puzzled post about tumblr get here? Must be past my bedtime. Hope all is well out there in lj/dw-land.

I've been working again on organizing the room we've called my "office" since we moved in (in 2003). Really, it was my storage unit for almost that whole time, and we kept the door closed and pretended it wasn't there except when we needed to reset the internet connection. Now it's a hybrid storage unit, transitional space (like transitional agriculture, in the space between organic & conventional, parts of the room are now sorted & ready to be filed/given away/etc), and office/spiritual working area. Well, ok, the office part really is just the filing cabinets in the corner thusfar, and they've been there all along, but they're starting to have files! Of things I might actually want to look at again, as opposed to 20 years of phone bills and the like. Slowly, the transitional part grows and even transforms into some open floorspace. I am not sure I'm ready to say I have hopes that I'll be "done" but I'm starting to believe it's possible that might happen. Which is definite progress because for most of the time we've lived here, I've been afraid to even go in the room & try to make sense of it. So you know, go me, making progress.

I've found some amazing things. I found a check from my grandfather (now deceased) from an account that is certainly no longer in existence (and made out to my first & middle names post-transition, so I'm not sure I could have cashed it anyway). I found little paper bags of stuff from Pantheacon 2008-2010, and going thru those was pretty interesting. In 2008, I took notes on a pad of paper & stuck them usefully in a bag with the program book and a pile of ads & business cards. This included my notes from my first workshop with

So I'm trying out dual-posting on lj & dw, since it seems the crossposting setup is also a casualty of lj's recent changes. Hopefully that will get cleared up, cuz of course now that I can't, I'd like to import my lj over here. I've got filters set up so I can read in both places without too much overlap, and I'll keep cleaning that up over time. I see why I've been avoiding this - it's time-consuming.

Productive day today - farmers market, a zillion errands, dishes, cooked, answered lj comments (it turns out if I actually post, people comment back! Which, yay!), played with lj/dw filters. I changed the filter in our heater (tho I'm not satisfied and will need to futz more later) to one which is far less gross than the fiber-y one we've been using (which can be cleaned but leaves fibers all over and so the messy factor makes me not want to deal). Did a bit of laundry (bearfairie is set on uniforms for work yay). Still going thru piles of paper and sorting into recycle, shred, file, and happily, recycle is winning by a lot (our big roll-y bin can't keep up with it right now). The dining room is not yet reclaimed from all the crap that got dumped there after the bedroom flood, but it's getting there.

We re-did our Ancestors' altar, which we'd meant to do for the Day of the Dead, but you know, we got there eventually. It's not like our Ancestors don't know us. They have a pretty new fall altar cloth (it's fall here in the Bay Area) - brown brocade with gold bamboo leaves - and they got attention from us together, so they're happy. And I'm changing my bovida, which I'm working on being a consistent Sunday thing. Consistency is a struggle for me, but I'm working on it.

Anyway, bedtime approaches. Hope all is well with y'all.

DW post: http://jcalanthe.dreamwidth.org/566.html ( comments there)

FYI, I have changed this journal's settings to minimize inclusion in search engines. In case that's kept any of you from commenting. I do not know how long that takes to propagate.

I'm slowly beginning the move to Dreamwidth as it seems critical mass of my flist is over there. I realize I'm behind the curve and many folks are on the tumblr and such but this is the pace I'm at. Any of you still reading, can you point me to your acct at DW if you have one? I'm jcalanthe there too. I may keep reading some here too, for those of you not moving, but I need to sort things so I'm not seeing the same posts in both places. So if you're not moving, let me know that too.

I'm reading a lot of Avengers/Iron Man/Captain America/Thor/etc these days, for which I largely blame/credit celli and her regular recs (thank you!!). Tho many of the rest of you are helping too. And somehow I've ended up reading Generation Kill even tho I don't really know who anyone is. Seriously, I've looked up pictures in IMDB and they just don't stick with me. Except for the one guy played by the guy from Castle who doesn't show up in fic much. Somehow this doesn't detract from my enjoyment. My Vorkosiganverse obsession seems to be waning, since I ran out of books and less recs fall into my lap, but still reading some of that. And I'm still on a bit of a Dresden Files kick - I lost like 2 days of my life reading other things the road to hell is paved with , an AU where Harry works for Marcone.

I've abandoned delicious and moved to pinboard. I'm glad to have a working place to obssessively tag fic again, and have been super impressed by the guy who creates/runs pinboard.

I'm watching little TV these days. My favorite this past summer was Necessary Roughness, which I haven't really seen people talk about. Sure, TV therapy is its own animal and I needed to la la la thru some details, but TK is smokin' (and a fun character with an actual arc), and who knew Riley would grow up to be so hot? & Dani is a pretty cool character - yay for a female lead. ( mild spoilers )

As to this fall's season, I watched a couple of eps of Revenge, and keep meaning to get back to it since I keep seeing it favorably discussed on my flist. & I mean to check out Once Upon a Time, again based on the flist. Mainly I was excited about The Playboy Club - I started watching to see pretty people, stuck around because it turns out I'm powerless before Eddie Cibrian and because Bunny Maureen reminded me of a young Ally Walker (who on Profiler was a formative girlcrush for me), and was completely hooked because of the subplot about the Mattachine Society. So, bummed that was canceled.

That's what I got. What are you all up to these days?